


inert bodies

by sawbones



Category: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Breaking and Entering, M/M, Unrequited Feelings (Or Not)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-16 07:41:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29821632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sawbones/pseuds/sawbones
Summary: "He had been trained to never hesitate, that if you put your finger on the trigger you should be ready to pull it, but treating life like a battlefield was the reason Dominic was standing in his kitchen in the middle of the night in the first place, cloudy eyed, bloodied, throat bared to him."Or, how to get over someone you never dated.
Relationships: Dominic "Bandit" Brunsmeier/Gilles "Montagne" Touré
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15





	inert bodies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ki_ru](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ki_ru/gifts).



> A commission for the immensely kind and talented [Kiru](https://kiruuuuu.tumblr.com/).

"How do you resign yourself to something that will never be?

You stop wanting just that thing, you go numb, or you kill the agent of desire."

\- Jenny Holzer

* * *

It was bone deep, the zero to sixty of being woken abruptly; spine rigid, thighs tensed to get up and run, eyes wide open to the ink-shot dark of night, trying to pull shapes out of doorways and shadows. A lifetime of field habits followed you home, every leave, every sabbatical, every night you put your head down whether on pack or pillow. 

Gilles knew he was being a little ridiculous as his hand crept across his duvet to the nightstand where he kept his faithful P9. It wasn’t paranoia, it was a precaution. He was the biggest, baddest thing in his apartment building with or without the gun, but it didn’t hurt to make damn sure, because sometimes it wasn’t a drunk neighbour coming home or foxes fighting behind the dumpsters. Sometimes it was the soft, familiar _click_ of the definitely locked front door closing.

The cool metal warmed quickly in his hand; it shouldn’t have been as comforting as it was, suddenly lethal in his checked boxers and well-worn Grateful Dead tee. Gilles slipped out of his bedroom into the darkened hallway. His front door stood at the far end of it, looking deceptively untouched. To his right was the living room and bathroom, to the left, his kitchen - the door ajar and leaking cold white light.

Intruder? Maybe, but they wouldn’t hit the kitchen first. Enemy agent? Still unlikely but not impossible. Whoever it was, they’d already outstayed their welcome. Gilles readjusted his grip, took a steadying breath, and kicked the door open; it rattled off the wall with enough force to leave a doorknob shaped dent, pushing back on him as he levelled his sights between shoulder blades.

The light, it turned out, was from his fridge, and the figure it so sweetly haloed was a familiar one: Dom. Dom, with his old Hells Angels vest on and blood on his hands, tracking brown-black fingerprints on the fridge door as he swayed into it. He hadn’t turned around when Gilles burst through the door, hadn’t even flinched, just stood there staring into the light.

Gilles lowered his gun, out of courtesy if nothing else, because he certainly didn’t feel any safer knowing it was Dom. His heart was in his throat and his tongue felt stuck to the roof of his mouth as Dom seemed to only just notice him, half turning with an indifference that was entirely too believable. 

There was a moment, just a split second where the corners of his mouth thinned and twisted down, a flicker of something before Dom caught it and pulled it into an unpleasant smile. 

“You got any beer in here?” Dom asked, “No whisky? Nothing?”

It was like a mask slipping into place, all crooked around the edges. Gilles couldn’t stand it, the renegade façade. It hurt in ways he wasn’t ready for. It took a moment for the question to filter through the fog of adrenaline and confusion in his mind. He didn’t know whether he should scoff or not. He felt like he should, but he was stuck in place, the gears of his mind struggling to turn fast enough.

“You know I only drink wine.” he said in bad German, because even that was better than Dom’s French. He immediately wished he hadn’t said it. Too close to familiar, too close to too easy. “What are you doing here? Why are you dressed like that?”

Dom turned to face him properly; he had a black eye and more blood on his shirt than Gilles had expected. He glanced down at himself and gave a grunt like he was just as surprised to see the black leather and stains.

“Old times’ sake?” he guessed, and there was something about the way he swayed on the spot that made Gilles wonder how drunk he actually was.

It was hard to tell what was real with Dom and what was a ploy - for attention, or sympathy, or spite. Sometimes all three. He knew if he pressed why Dom was there, he’d get the same tease of an answer, “for old times’ sake”. What old times he meant, Gilles didn’t know. An endless game of will-he-won’t-he wasn’t something people tended to look back on fondly.

“You need to leave.” Gilles said. He put the gun down on the kitchen table, pointing away from both of them. He didn’t sound angry even though he was furious, and the control was as gratifying as it ever was. 

Dom’s smile didn’t falter. Gilles knew he wanted to provoke a reaction, it’s what he did. It’s how he lived, pushing from one altercation to the next. You didn’t have to deal with the fallout if the explosions never stopped. He made a vague gesture to the mess on his shirt.

“Not even gonna ask about the blood?”

“Don’t care.” Gilles said. “It’s not yours.”

He knew it wasn’t Dom’s and he didn’t care because all it meant is that he did something stupid, but not _really_ stupid. He didn’t care, because despite everything, he wasn’t a bad man and whoever it belonged to almost certainly had it coming. Maybe picked a fight they couldn’t finish, or said the wrong thing to the wrong person. It was one of the few things Dom ever promised that Gilles could believe.

Dom’s laugh was gritty, dry, but his eyes were bright and there was something half-charming in crow’s feet at the corners. It was like he was warming up again, remembering his off-the-cuff act. It was the most dangerous thing in the room, including the gun on the table and the knife in Dom’s boot.

“Alright, okay. My mistake,” he said, “Next time I’ll make sure it’s all mine--”

“There won’t be a next time, Dominic. This is it.” Gilles said, and tried his very best to mean it because he wouldn’t - couldn’t - give Dom what he wanted anymore, whether it was a soft place to land or another shouting match. “You can’t keep coming here. You can’t just _break into my home_ , Dominic, it doesn’t work like that. Please, just go.”

“This isn’t your home, it’s where you sleep between deployments. We don’t have homes anymore.” Dom said. “That’s why I’m here, right?”

“I thought you were here for old times’ sake?” It sounded more like defeat than Gilles wanted to admit. Dom laughed again. He tried not to flinch. “At least shut the refrigerator.”

He seemed to think about it for a moment, like he was considering the benefits of spoiling Gilles’ milk; the backlighting made the scar on his scalp look like a trench but the line of his broad shoulders was just as sharp as ever. The light cut out as the door shut, bottles within clinking; the blackness was so abrupt it was startling. He couldn’t see, but it was still thrilling just to be alone with Dom in the dark. Neither of them moved or spoke, neither of them so much as breathed for what felt like minutes. 

Dom took a step forward, so Gilles moved back. The back of his arms touched the cool marble counter, pricking goosebumps. Dom passed him, and stopped in front of where the gun still lay on the table. It looked small, like a toy.

“I could have shot you.” Gilles said. His eyes were starting to adjust, but Dom was facing away from him anyway. “I still could.”

“Number one rule of firearms: don’t point it at anything you’re not ready to kill.” Dom picked up the gun and turned it over in his hands, testing the weight. “You’re not stupid enough to keep a loaded gun in your house.”

_You’re not ready to kill._

It was equal parts a taunt and an admission of trust. Gilles reached over and carefully extracted the gun from Dom’s grip. It wasn’t loaded - and it never would be outside of active duty - but he still didn’t want him touching it. Stranger things had happened than a seemingly unloaded gun going off in someone’s hands. Things like waking up in the middle of the night because the man you had once loved fiercely, stupidly, _futilely,_ broke into your flat to raid your fridge for beer he knew you didn’t drink.

It was hard to rationalise as anything but a slap in the face, but that is what Gilles had come to expect from Dom. He had taken that affection and turned it into a game, pushed it and twisted and turned it inside out. It was a joke to him, and Gilles hadn’t realised he was the butt of it until it was too late.

Dom eyed the gun like he wanted to grab it back, but he didn’t. Instead he sighed, suddenly so world-weary, and sat himself on the edge of the kitchen table. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked at Gilles with an expression obscured by more than just shadows.

“He kicked me out again,” he said, with a pause just long enough to torture Gilles some more. “For good, this time.”

Gilles was not surprised to hear that even Elias’ near-inexhaustible patience had, in fact, been exhausted. He had thrown him out before, Dom made it sound more serious this time. Gilles was almost glad, for Elias’ sake. He was not his teammate’s keeper.

“Made him call in his last favour with the local brass.” It was borderline flippant, the way he said it, but there’s a tightness around his mouth that gave him away. “Said he was doing it for Six, not me. Said he wouldn’t do it again.”

Gilles kept his mouth shut. He had very deliberately not asked. He didn’t need to know, he didn’t _want_ to know. In fact, the less he knew about Dom’s life, the better. He didn’t want to know, he wanted to forget. In the end, he shrugged.

“I’m sure there’s a spare bunk at the barracks, if you want me to order you an Uber,” Gilles said. Dom jerked like he’d been shoved. He seemed frustrated that he wasn’t getting the response he wanted. 

“You’re still bitter about it, aren’t you?” he said with a dry laugh, “Jesus. Does Doc know you borrow his hero complex? Not everyone needs to be saved. _I_ didn’t need to be saved. Don’t take it so personally.”

“I didn’t want to save you, Dom,” and he _knows_ , he knows he shouldn’t engage, he shouldn’t let him drag them down this path but he’s tired, “I wanted to be your friend. And yeah, I was attracted to you. I thought - hoped, maybe - that it was mutual, but you have this thing where you’ve convinced yourself that you need to shoot first and I--”

Gilles stopped himself short, took a steadying breath. They didn’t owe each other explanations, least of all himself, but wasn’t it every spurned lover’s fantasy to sit their ex down and describe the hurt? The doubts, the struggle? But they weren’t exes. They weren’t anything anymore. They would always only be each other’s “almost” now.

“I know what you’re doing,” Gilles concluded. It was a half guess, a sort of dawning realisation, “You’re not going to make me hate you. You do a good enough job of that yourself.”

A silence followed, a stillness he had never seen from Dom; the tonic immobility of a shark turned upside down, eyes open and breathing steady. His expression was blank but there was clearly a conflict going on behind his eyes. The realisation hit Gilles like an open palm: he was embarrassed. 

More than that, he was ashamed. 

The resignation in his sigh shook Gilles’ resolve, if only for a moment. In their line of work, vulnerability could be a death sentence. He could only imagine how spending so much time undercover had compounded that, on top of everything else. Nobody wanted to show their soft underbelly in the presence of so many butchers. Gilles didn’t want to be one of the ones with a knife in hand, he never did. Not for Dom, not for anybody else.

“The bathroom’s down the hall, if you want to get cleaned up before you go.” he said. He was offering him an out, but there was no question that it was an _out_ \- for both their sake. It would be too easy to tear chunks out of each other the longer they spent dancing around the issue. 

Dom nodded, his expression still clouded. He pushed himself off the table silently and left the kitchen. A moment later, Gilles heard the light turn on and the tap running, and let the tiredness wash over him in the silence left behind. It was the kind of quiet that left your ears ringing, like the calm that followed a gunshot - not calm, really, but the disorientating absence of noise. There would be no point in going back to bed after this, he had lost enough sleep over Dom before to know he would be wide awake staring at the ceiling until the grey morning light crept through his bedroom window like a thief. 

Footsteps in the hallway stopped outside the kitchen door, the hesitation almost shy. Dom stepped inside, cleaner and holding a dirty towel to his chest like a comfort blanket. Gilles took it from him, careful to not brush fingers, and was quietly amazed he’d been considerate enough to not use a white one.

“Gilles,” Dom began and then stopped, lacking all the bravado from minutes ago. If he had a question to ask, it wasn’t coming easily, but Gilles didn’t rush him. “Is it too late?”

Gilles turned the question over in his mind. Too late for forgiveness? Friendship? To catch a cab? He realised that if he kissed Dom then, if he reached out and pulled him close, he wouldn’t pull away again. He knew that if their positions were switched, it’s what Dom would do.

“Yeah.” he said, “I think it might be.”

There was more to say, so much more, and he scrambled for the words like he was looking for coins in the gutter. It would be so easy to cut and run, too easy. He had been trained to never hesitate, that if you put your finger on the trigger you should be ready to pull it, but treating life like a battlefield was the reason Dominic was standing in his kitchen in the middle of the night in the first place, cloudy eyed, bloodied, throat bared to him. Gilles inhaled sharply.

“You’re not a bad man, Dominic, but you need help. If not for yourself, then for the people who care about you. There are more of us than you know.”

A car drove by on the street outside, headlights cutting a dazzling line through the darkness before it was gone. Dom nodded again like he already knew the answer, and it was quite likely he did. He was smart, too smart for his own good sometimes, but it didn’t seem to help. He turned to go but stopped in the doorway, his hands braced on the frame like he was ready to force himself through it.

“I’m sorry about tonight,” he said. It was strained, unpractised, but earnest, “About your towel and...everything else…”

He trailed off with a thoughtful frown, then shook his head. Gilles didn’t say anything; he didn’t have to. An apology was a start, and a start was more than what they had before. Whether he had genuinely reached Dom or simply given him pause for thought, it didn’t matter. The front door closed with the same soft _click_ it had opened with, and it was like he had never been there at all.


End file.
